Conventional signal recording technologies include vacuum tube oscilloscopes and digital oscilloscopes. Vacuum tube oscilloscopes are becoming obsolete because of the inability to satisfy the demands associated with new technology. Digital oscilloscopes rely largely on state-of-the-art electronic-based analog-to-digital converters that have exhibited very slow improvement in recent years.
While the sampling resolution of digital oscilloscopes has improved incrementally, the dynamic range at the maximum sampling rate is inversely related to it, forcing a tradeoff between sampling resolution and dynamic range.